The depraved husband who drugged and filmed his wife being raped by strangers covered for his crimes by accusing her of cheating on him, a French court heard yesterday.
When Gisele Pelicot told her husband Dominique she needed treatment for an unexplained sexual illness, he suggested she must be having affairs while he was out cycling and playing boules, asking her with a hollow laugh: ‘So, what are you doing with your days?’
The 71-year-old grandma was oblivious to the grim truth: that her gynaecological trouble resulted from being serially abused after Pelicot slipped tranquillisers into her evening meals.
The retired power company worker’s attempt to portray his wife as the sex-obsessed party in their seemingly ‘perfect’ marriage emerged when Judge Roger Arata outlined the prosecution case.
Together with 50 men from all walks of French life whom he recruited on a website for voyeurs and swingers, Pelicot, also 71, is accused of aggravated rape.
Dominique Pelicot is accused of recruiting men online to assault his wife repeatedly over a decade as his trial heard he also drugged and photographed his daughter
Police found a file in Pelicot’s computer labelled ‘My Daughter Naked’. Pictured: Caroline Darian (left) at the courthouse during the trial of her father
He is said to have orchestrated the attacks on his wife between 2011 and 2020, which came to light after he was arrested for taking photographs up the skirts of female supermarket shoppers.
When police searched the retirement chalet that he and Mme Pelicot shared, in the pretty Provencal village of Mazan, they found some 20,000 images of his wife being defiled by 72 strange men.
Pelicot, who often directed the rapes, filed his films with tags such as ‘Her Rapists’, ‘Abuse’ and ‘My Slut’. He also noted the attackers’ names and details of the acts they perpetrated, allowing police to trace 50 of them. However, a further 22 were unidentifiable and will never be brought to justice as the case has now been closed.
To satisfy themselves that Mme Pelicot had been unconscious and had not consented to sex, as many of the arrested attackers claimed, investigators had been forced to confront her with the sickening videos.
Asked at a pre-trial hearing how she reacted on learning she had been debased by the supposedly respectable family man with whom she had three children, she said: ‘He disgusts me. I feel dirty, defiled, betrayed. It was a tsunami. I was hit by a high-speed train.’ The shock caused her to have a breakdown and she is said to have attempted suicide several times.
Determined to shame her attackers and highlight the crime of drug-induced rape, she has courageously waived her right to have the trial held in private and remain anonymous.
Yesterday, the court heard that Pelicot even drugged and took compromising photographs of his daughter. Investigators are said to have uncovered a file labelled ‘My Daughter Naked’ in which they found a photograph of Caroline Darian, now a middle-aged mother, lying asleep on a bed.
She appeared to have been dressed in some of her mother’s clothes but was partially naked.
Dominique P. is accused of orchestrating the sick rape ring, filming strangers he met online attacking his wife while she was drugged between 2011 and 2020
The picture had been taken at the family home in Villiers-sur-Marne, near Paris, before 2013 when Pelicot and his wife retired and moved to Provence.
As the judge alluded to this incident, Mme Darian – who has since written a memoir titled I No Longer Call Him Papa – was overcome with emotion and had to be helped from the courtroom. Though her father has admitted to having ‘uncontrollable sexual impulses’ and drugging his wife for rape, his lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro says he will deny violating his daughter.
One of the men accused of raping Mme Pelicot is said to be on the run but 49 are squeezed into the modern courtroom. While 14 of them plead guilty, Judge Arata said 35 denied the charges.
The victim and her family shook their heads in anger and disbelief as he described their alleged attacks – often in unprintable detail – and outlined the excuses and explanations they had offered under questioning. A recurring theme was that Pelicot had convinced the men he invited to the house that they were taking part in a kinky sex game to which his wife was a willing party.
Some of the accused also claimed they were aware that what they were doing was wrong but were afraid to leave the house without satisfying Pelicot’s wishes. One claimed the husband was ‘entirely in charge’ and that he had ‘just acted like a robot’.
Another, who allegedly raped Mme Pelicot on six occasions, also said he had behaved according to her husband’s instructions.
Yet another claimed Pelicot wanted to have homosexual sex with him, and he agreed on condition that he could rape his wife first.
One man excused himself by saying he assumed a woman couldn’t have been raped if he had sex with her when her husband was present. Then there was the man who claimed he had no idea the victim was asleep because she was lying face-down. And so, the litany of denial went on.
A black and white facial reconstruction of a younger Dominique P is seen in this handout image
Co-defendants speak with a lawyer at the courthouse during the trial of a man accused of drugging his wife for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, a small town in the south of France, in Avignon, on September 2, 2024
Beatrice Zavarro, lawyer for the accused Dominique P, waits at the courthouse during the trial of her client accused of drugging his wife for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, a small town in the south of France, in Avignon, on September 2, 2024
This photograph taken on September 2, 2024 shows a road sign at the entrance of the town of Mazan, southern France. Dominique P, accused of drugging his wife for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, faces a French court in Avignon
During a break, the victim’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, insisted that under French law none of these explanations could exonerate the men from charges of rape.
One needed only to look at the videos to see that Mme Pelicot looked ‘dead’ and had no idea what was happening, he said. Moreover, the court heard how Pelicot told investigators that all the man were aware that he had rendered her unconscious and that she had not consented.
When interviewed, the court heard, Pelicot described the modus operandi he employed to allay his wife’s suspicions.
When a rendezvous was arranged, he would order the men to park their cars away from the house, banned them from smoking and wearing aftershave, and made them undress in the kitchen to ensure they didn’t leave clothes in the bedroom.
The case, which is scandalising France and is expected to last four months, will continue today with evidence from detectives who led the investigation.
Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland.